Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts
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Consolidation and Discontent
Over the course of 1933 dissatisfaction among the stormtroopers grew prarallel to the stabilization of Hitler’s leadership and the consolidation of the NSDAP as the only remaining legal political party. Although Röhm in a speech in Frankfurt an der Oder on 18 June 1933 continued to praise his SA as the ‘trailblazers of the new Reich’ and requested that his men ‘be active in the same spirit as before’, Hitler, his Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, and other leading National Socialists around the same time announced the end of the National Socialist ‘revolution’.196 The excessive violence of the previous months committed to a very considerable extent by the SA could no longer be ‘justified’ on the basis of an imminent danger posed by determined and powerful political opponents. Consequently, the position of the SA weakened, despite the fact that it continued to grow by incorporating previous rivals into its ranks and improved its financial situation to the degree that it could preserve at least a relative independence from the NSDAP. Many SA men felt increasingly left out of or even betrayed by the party, as the eagerly awaited elevation of their social status, including material ‘compensation’ for their political activism, only materialized for a minority of them – largely, the more high-ranking SA leaders. Among the rank and file calls for a ‘second revolution’, or at least for the next step in establishing the Volksgemeinschaft, thus became popular. These stormtroopers expected that the proponents of this new ‘revolution’ would not compromise with the establishment but would fulfil the promises of a fundamentally new social order in which the SA would sit at the top of the hierarchy. Such inner-party opposition was dangerous for Hitler, particularly as it was a grassroots phenomenon, fuelled by the dissatisfaction of those who were only too keen to (re)gain a middle-class respectability and stability through a permanent ‘civil’ job. Because of this sharp contrast between rhetorical radicalism and longings for social stability, some historians have lampooned SA men as ‘desperadoes in search of a pension’ (Desperados mit Pensionserwartungen).197 Such intellectually well-placed criticism nevertheless neglected the very real pressure that most SA men felt at a time of persistent hardship, frozen wages, and record unemployment, and that rather obscured some of the motives behind the ever-growing alienation of the party establishment from its paramilitary rank and file.
5
THE ‘RÖHM PURGE’ AND THE MYTH OF THE HOMOSEXUAL NAZI
It is possible and seems likely that the masses of the petite bourgeoisie fall again into a morality tailored for them on the basis of a dirty psychology; and that they see Hitler as the saviour once more.
— Thomas Mann, journal entry, 4 July 19341
Although the first wave of Nazi violence against real and imagined opponents of the dictatorship lessened toward the end of 1933, the early months of 1934 saw increasing tensions in Germany. This growing conflict was largely internal and pitted those who insisted on completing the ‘revolution’ by pushing for a fundamental transformation of German society in line with National Socialist ideology against those who favoured compromise with traditional elitist groups in order to further consolidate the NSDAP’s newly acquired position of power. These two positions, commonly associated with Röhm on the one side and Hitler, Göring, and Himmler on the other, were not only about ideological differences but also fundamental discrepancies in life experience and social status. This chapter will first trace the lines of this important conflict and re-examine the political ambitions of the SA in the first half of 1934. It will then analyse the events that unfolded between 30 June and 2 July in some detail and discuss their immediate political consequences. Finally, it will put the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ into the wider context of the legal and political development of the Third Reich, touching as well on the origin of the cliché of the homosexual stormtrooper.2
Showdown
Despite the Nazi takeover of power and regardless of the stormtroopers’ elevated social status and improved chances on the job market, as outlined in the previous chapter, dissatisfaction among them had grown steadily since the summer of 1933. A considerable number of the better educated but relatively new members of the Nazi Party had already been able to embark on new careers thanks to their new political affiliation. In common parlance, these individuals were the so-called Märzgefallene, the ‘March windfalls’ or ‘March victims’, an allusion to the more than 200 revolutionaries who had died in Berlin and Vienna in March 1848. By contrast, many of the long-time activists still suffered economic hardship, persistent unemployment, and generally poor career prospects. These men were quick to blame the usual suspects, Jews and the ‘fat cats’ of industry and politics, but increasingly they also questioned the party leadership’s ambition and ability to fulfil the far-reaching promises made in previous years.
Furthermore, the thousands of Communists and Social Democrats who now dressed in the brown shirt contributed to the growing dissatisfaction that in particular troubled the long-time rank-and-file stormtroopers. The extent to which these former competitors infiltrated the SA has been a matter of debate since the early 1930s.3 Even prior to the Nazi takeover of power, the KPD claimed that it had successfully penetrated the SA. By its own account, by late 1932, it had no fewer than 164 ‘confidants’ in Berlin, and in Saxony had established eighteen in Zwickau, and forty-two in Chemnitz.4 In the following two years it is clear that many more Communists and Social Democrats joined the SA, at times voluntarily, at times by summary integration. The notoriously unreliable Rudolf Diels, the first chief of the Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt, or Gestapa, later claimed that about 70 per cent of all new members of the SA in the capital in 1933 had been former Communists.5 Such figures are certainly excessive. It should also be noted that some of these ‘beefsteaks’ (so named because they were brown on the outside, but red within) only joined the Nazi paramilitaries for tactical reasons and not out of enthusiasm or political ‘awakening’. At a time when SA terror was almost unrestricted, many reasonably believed it advisable to join the ranks of the stormtroopers, particularly if one had a background in a rival organization. Those Social Democrats and Communists who in the spring and summer of 1933 joined the Stahlhelm, the only remaining legal non-Nazi paramilitary group, for tactical reasons quickly found themselves integrated into the expanding SA. The degree of loyalty that existed within the ranks was therefore extremely unclear, all the more if one recalls that paramilitary affiliations prior to 1933 were in many cases not stable, with the parties involved regularly struggling to determine whether conversions were ‘genuine’ or ‘formal’. Yet contemporary observers and later historians agree that the number of individuals who joined the SA for tactical reasons was significant, and that they were partly responsible for the intensified anti-capitalist and anti-reactionary currents among the stormtroopers in the early stages of the Third Reich.6
In December 1933, Hitler appointed Röhm and Hess as Reich ministers without portfolio. The ambitious Röhm took this as an endorsement of his far-reaching goal to secure a lasting and important role for the SA in the Third Reich in general and in military matters in particular. To achieve this, the SA was to be elevated to the most important armour-bearer in the Reich, ideally absorbing the comparatively small Reichswehr and its ‘reactionary’ generals. The ‘grey rock’ of the Reichswehr had to sink in the ‘brown flood’, Röhm allegedly once said.7 It is, however, highly doubtful that Röhm intended to push through such plans at any cost. For his biographer Eleanor Hancock, it is more likely that he would have backed down if he had been unable to win Hitler’s favour for his plan, as he had done in 1925.8
At the beginning of 1934 the SA numbered more than three million men, whereas the Reichswehr remained officially limited to 100,000 professional soldiers. In the following months the rivalry between the SA and the Reichswehr escalated into a veritable beauty contest for the favour of the Führer. Initially, Hitler refrained from taking sides. Even if he was early on more inclined to favour the Reichswehr for military reasons, h
e sought to benefit from the SA’s pressure on the regular army, which he believed would make its leaders more willing to accept the political prerogatives of the regime. However, in a keynote speech delivered to military leaders on 28 February 1934, Hitler for the first time publicly rejected Röhm’s plans to turn the SA into a people’s militia and instead confirmed that the Reichswehr would remain the regular armed force of the German Reich. For practical reasons he urged close collaboration between the Reichswehr and the SA in the areas of border protection and pre-military training of German youth for the time being, but he left no doubt that in the longer run the SA was to abstain from acting as a military force.9 In doing so, Hitler renewed his commitment to a position that he had taken ever since the reorganization of the SA in 1925–6. Yet Röhm also remained loyal to his ideas from the mid-1920s. In this way the earlier conflict between Röhm’s Frontbann politics and Hitler’s idea of a party-controlled SA now clashed for a second time. In 1934, however, this conflict was no longer confined to the fringes of an obscure splinter party and its paramilitary wing, but took centre stage in national politics. Consequently, more actors were involved, and all of them were playing for high stakes.10
Röhm had been a controversial figure in the NSDAP ever since he had returned from Bolivia in late 1930, and his position had not been helped by the ex-Nazi Helmuth Klotz’s publication in March 1932 of Röhm’s private letters to the physician Karl-Guenter Heimsoth, a psychologist who shared the SA supreme leader’s military passion and had himself a strong interest in male homosexuality.11 Highly intimate in nature, these letters left no doubt about Röhm’s homosexuality. Not least for this reason, Röhm developed more and more enemies within the NSDAP and even became the target of a murderous conspiracy that failed.12 In the spring of 1934 he faced not only hostility from several Nazi leaders, including Göring and Himmler, but also pressure from Werner von Blomberg and his loyal assistant Walter von Reichenau. Dubbed a ‘rubber lion’ by the military staff for his well-known allegiance to Hitler, Blomberg in the months prior to 30 June 1934 deliberately played up the risks posed by the SA and presented the Reichswehr as the only reliable defence the regime had. Some historians, most notably John Wheeler-Bennett, have claimed that Blomberg successfully compelled Hitler to initiate a violent crackdown on the SA. The available evidence does not validate such accusations.13 Yet there is no denying that Blomberg and his confidants intended to defeat the rival SA and were willing to pay a high price for that success.14
In the spring of 1934 another group in German politics attempted to strike at the SA and in this way target the Nazi regime more generally. This was the opposition from within the government. The core of this group consisted of men who worked for Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen. Led by the Bavarian lawyer and political writer Edgar J. Jung and von Papen’s chief press officer Herbert von Bose, these individuals belonged to the so-called Jungkonservativen, or ‘neoconservatives’, who had initially advocated for an authoritarian state to overcome the problems of the Weimar Republic but were quickly repelled by the Nazi regime’s contempt for human rights and civil liberties. They were disgusted by the SA’s radical rhetoric, seeing a Nazi ‘social’ revolution as the ultimate victory of the ‘rule of the inferior’, and thereby of terror, brutality, and lawlessness.15 Unlike von Papen, who constantly talked about higher values and morale but in the end would accept even the political murder of his closest collaborators, the members of this circle demonstrated genuine courage and determination. They prepared to overthrow the Nazi regime and ideally replace it with a new government of the conservative right supported by Reich President Paul von Hindenburg and the Reichswehr.16
As a starting signal of their campaign the members of this group carefully drafted a damning speech for von Papen to deliver in Marburg in Middle Hesse on 17 June 1934, with the hope that such harsh criticism of the Nazi regime would spark a political sea change. This criticism was both substantial and cutting, and represented a frontal attack on the character of the NSDAP’s rule as well as its ideology: ‘No nation can afford a constant revolt from below if it wants to pass the test of history,’ von Papen lectured. ‘The movement must come to a standstill some day; at some time a stable social structure must emerge, maintained by an impartial judiciary and by an undisputed state authority.’ Not surprisingly, the speech did not dismiss the ‘national revolution’ of 1933 and its ‘achievements’ of the last one and a half years, but it clearly deplored the ‘excesses’ that had occurred. The conspirators’ conclusion was nothing less than a verbal declaration of war: ‘The time of emancipation of the lowest social orders against the higher orders is past.’17 When von Papen spoke these words, much to the delight of the majority of his audience, two local SA leaders in uniform are reported to have left the hall.18
The location of the speech, the old auditorium of one of Germany’s most respected universities, was well chosen for an attack on the arrivistes of the Third Reich. The decorous academic atmosphere contrasted sharply with the bloody realities of the streets. However, it also demonstrated the isolation of the conspirators. While the Nazi Party could easily bring together thousands of followers in market squares and sport stadiums, the former had chosen a respectable but in many respects limited location for their damning words. These limitations were aggravated by the fact that Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda just hours after the speech prohibited the newspapers from reporting on it and also prevented it from being broadcast on the radio. Nevertheless, the speech became widely known in Germany and abroad, as the conspirators, in anticipation of Nazi censorship, had distributed hundreds of copies of it to friends and foreign journalists, who in turn made it into an international media event. Yet the intended political wake-up call turned out to be a failure, as the Reichswehr as well as the aged Reich President Hindenburg did nothing. The speech did not cause a change of government; instead, it accelerated the arrival of the long-built-up clash within the Nazi camp.
On 19 June 1934, just two days after von Papen’s Marburg speech, the governors of the German provinces met at the Ministry of the Interior in Berlin. In his opening speech at this confidential meeting Wilhelm Frick, the Reich Minister of the Interior, not only announced a further centralization of powers, but also lamented the increasing internal frictions that were undermining the authority of the state. In addition, he reported, in what was perhaps a direct reference to the von Papen speech, acts of sabotage had increased over the last few days. The euphoria of the spring of 1933 could not be expected to last very long, Frick said, claiming that it was all the more necessary to take a tough stance against ‘defeatists’ of all kinds. Following this speech, several governors offered reports of widespread criticism of the Nazi Party and its representatives in their respective regions. They pointed out that many ‘character deficiencies’ among local and regional Nazi leaders had become a serious problem for the public image of the party. The German population could not understand the comparatively high salaries of higher functionaries of the Nazi Party and its organizations, the Oberpräsident Ferdinand von Lüninck from Koblenz claimed, particularly as several of these leaders now boasted openly of their new titles and wealth. His colleague from Düsseldorf, Carl Christian Schmidt, referred directly to the SA as one of the sources of local discontent in his province and asked for more support from the SA field police to deal with marauding stormtroopers, who were otherwise nearly exempt from prosecution.19
The immediate results of this meeting are not known. Yet the topics addressed, as well as the relatively frank debate that occurred, indicate that the von Papen speech had encouraged conservative critics of the NSDAP and its policies to come out into the open. In line with this shift, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd, reported on 20 June 1934 about the tensions existing within the German government. There were rumours, he said, ‘that the Reichswehr, which has already increased its force with new recruits, will, in conjunction with the SS troops, of which the SA are jealous and which are supposed to
be composed of conservative elements and also perhaps with the Prussian police, compel the Chancellor to dismiss his radical advisers and also the SA troops, and to govern conservatively. Some seem confident that this consummation will be reached fairly soon.’ However, the ambassador continued, a ‘revolution to the right’ was unlikely to happen, as Hitler, not least because of his ‘unwillingness to sever connections with his old followers’, would not ‘lend himself to any such movement’.20
Dodd’s report testifies to the extent to which observers expected a violent clash between the ‘revolutionary’ SA and the comparatively ‘conservative’ forces of the Reichswehr and the increasingly powerful SS in the early summer of 1934. Although the ambassador clearly overemphasized Hitler’s loyalty to Röhm and other ‘Old Fighters’, he was right about the timing of this confrontation, in that it took only several days for these political tensions to erupt into a veritable political coup within the Nazi Party. Ever since the deadly events of early July 1934, political observers have speculated on the background of the killings and those who orchestrated them.21 Many who were directly involved in politics during this time reported that Hitler was not the central figure in the events, as he seemed quite reluctant to press for tough decisions until late in June 1934. However, as we will see later in this chapter, it was Hitler who made the final decision to strike and, once he had made up his mind, pushed it through without mercy or remorse.
It is meanwhile well established that the driving individuals in the fatal attack on Röhm and the OSAF in the months prior to 30 June 1934 were Göring; Himmler; Himmler’s adjutant Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the SD or Sicherheitsdienst, the SS intelligence agency; and the Reichswehr generals Werner von Blomberg, in 1934 the Minister of Defence, and Walter von Reichenau, at this time head of the Wehramt under Blomberg’s control. In the view of the historian Kurt Gossweiler and the materialist historiography advocated within the German Democratic Republic, ‘big business’ was another, if not the most important, factor in the liquidation of Röhm’s SA, as the latter allegedly aimed at the ‘abolition of the preeminent position of the heavy industries’ and big farmers (Großagrarier).22 Goebbels switched sides in this clash just in time to remain in office, yet most commentators of the time noticed that his position after the purge seemed considerably weakened. By contrast, post-war statements that asserted the existence of an elaborate ‘SA plot’ to overthrow the government in order to violently fulfil the Nazi ‘revolution’ and kill lists ‘issued by the OSAF’ should be treated with extreme care.23 Dissenting voices and the dissatisfaction of many SA leaders should not be confused with a sustainable political strategy. A proper plan for violent action against Hitler, the increasingly powerful SS, and the Reichswehr simply did not exist.24